In the conventional fabric printing machine, a pallet holding a raw fabric (a workpiece to be printed) is configured to be fixed to a mechanical structure and transferred, thereby enabling a printing job only. With the fixed pallet machine being used currently, the design capability is extremely restricted and its productivity is significantly lowered, thereby leading to an increase in the production cost and thus difficulties in the sale thereof. A hybrid process (combined flocking and printing) can be characterized as follows. In order to carry out a multi-color printing in a consecutive manner, the pallet necessarily requires a proper heat of 100 to 120° C. When a binding process for flocking is performed, the pallet must be properly cooled (below 30° C.). The reasons are that in order for the consecutive printing to be successfully performed, a previously printed ink must be dried (at the drying temperature of 160 to 180° C.) before a subsequent color printing. In case of the flock binder, if the pallet has a heat, a film is formed in the surface of the binder and thus the flocking cannot be easily accomplished. This will result decisively in a reduction in the productivity and quality degradation.
Conventionally, the pallet is formed of an aluminum plate of 12 to 15 thickness or an aluminum cast in order to prevent bending or distortion. Thus, it disadvantageously takes much time to heat up and cool the pallet. In particular, with the conventional process, a multi-color printing can be carried out to a certain degree (without considering the productivity), but a multi-color flocking cannot be performed. This is because its quality is extremely degraded, along with its decreased productivity.
Besides the above serious problems, i.e., the degradation in the productivity and quality due to repetitive heating and cooling of the pallet and the limited design capability, various other problems exist. In the flocking process, remaining pile is scattered into the atmosphere and thus the entire factory can be contaminated. Therefore, it adversely affects all the products under fabrication and incurs very serious problems with the working environment.
In case of the conventional downward flocking process, a large amount of pile remains, except for the flocked piles. However, there exists no way to recover the remaining pile. Even though a separate removing facility or process can be added, the scattering of the remaining pile cannot easily be prevented.